The Happy-Time Network

At USA, all shows must be colorful, sunny and upbeat. As the No. 1 cable channel readies a host of new programs, a danger lurks—is the formula too formulaic?

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Actors Jeffrey Donovan and Gabrielle Anwar film a scene for the upcoming season of USA's 'Burn Notice' in Hollywood, Fla., Tuesday.
Jason Henry for the Wall Street Journal

By

Amy Chozick

Updated April 22, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

Just before the government approved Comcast Corp.'s $13.75 billion bid to control NBC Universal, the soon-to-be-named chief executive, Steve Burke, got comfortable in his Manhattan apartment and popped in DVDs of "Burn Notice" and "White Collar."

Even though Mr. Burke wasn't a regular viewer of USA network's lighthearted dramas about a spy in Miami and a New York swindler working for the FBI, the shows were as critical to Comcast's plans as NBC or Universal Studios—maybe more so.

Following the success of "Monk" about five years ago, USA Network has been focusing on series that have bright blue skies in the background and a sunny, optimistic feel. WSJ's Amy Chozick reports.

USA network, once known for a bland but reliable mishmash of wrestling and "Murder, She Wrote" reruns, has in recent years built an identity defined by sunny, optimistic original series. Shows like "Burn Notice," "Covert Affairs" and "Royal Pains" have helped make it the most-watched cable channel for the past five years.

"Financially, it's the most important property NBC Universal has," says Mr. Burke, who was Comcast's chief operating officer before taking over NBCU.

In biweekly meetings with USA's top executive, Mr. Burke has approved USA's largest investment in original programming to date, preparing six new shows in addition to the nine it already has. A stack of 30 to 40 scripts are piled up on one USA executive's desk, including a couple of miniseries and comedies.

In June, USA will premiere "Necessary Roughness," a new series about a scorned Long Island wife and psychiatrist who becomes a therapist to NFL players, and "Suits," a buddy legal drama about a genius slacker and a high-powered New York attorney. It is casting "Over/Under," about a Wall Street trader with a gambling problem, and recently shot pilots for "Common Law," about a couple of bickering L.A. cops, and "Eden," about a concierge at a New York luxury hotel who caters to guests' every whim.

The Happy Formula

BLUE SKY: USA executives like to see a lot of it in their shows, like 'Royal Pains,' set on the beaches of Long Island.
USA Network

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CLEAN AND UPTOWN: For 'White Collar,' producers scour New York for the least gritty locations.
USA Network

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51.2 YEARS: Average age of a USA viewer. The new show 'Necessary Roughness' seeks a younger audience.
USA Network

USA is so specific about the look and feel of its shows that it tells producers to make sure there is a "fruit bowl" in each potentially drab scene. This is metaphor: It could literally mean a bowl of fruit or, more often, a splash of color, as in a scene in "White Collar" with a red office chair in an otherwise monotone room or a bold-colored billboard outside a window, against an always-blue sky. In the USA playbook, shaky hand-held-camera shots, a favorite of grittier shows like TNT's "Southland," are verboten.

The sunshine strategy isn't yielding the critical paeans of "Mad Men" and its ilk, but it's working. USA has had a string of hits like "White Collar," "Royal Pains," about a doctor in the Hamptons, and "Covert Affairs," which follows a young CIA agent (The hook: "Single woman, double life.") Its newest series, "Fairly Legal" about a young mediator, averages 4.5 million viewers a week, according to Nielsen Co. "Burn Notice," with seven million, is one of the biggest hits on cable.

When writer Matt Nix and Fox Television Studios pitched "Burn Notice" in 2005, the lead character Michael Westen, a spy dismissed by the CIA, lived in inner-city Newark and went undercover as a crack addict to infiltrate an illegal gun operation.

USA Co-President Jeff Wachtel led Mr. Nix and Fox Television Studios president David Madden into Ms. Hammer's L.A. office, a sleek, sunny space with wide-open beige carpets and big, bright windows. "In his very theatrical way, Jeff said, 'This is what the show needs to look like,' " Mr. Madden says.

The show would be set in Miami, not Jersey. Rather than posing as a drug addict, Westen pretended to be an upscale art dealer to bust an illegal art-sales ring. He lives near his nagging retiree mother. "We were cranky about it for a brief time, but the posters looked a lot prettier than if it had been set in Newark," Mr. Madden says.

USA's hyper-marketing strategy has its risks. Too many of the same type of shows could make the network seem predictable and formulaic. "In a creative world, when you have a brand the danger is that every show becomes the same show," says Jon Turteltaub, executive producer of "Common Law."

Last month Mr. Wachtel sent an email titled "overlap" to show runners warning them about using "creative mainstays" associated with other USA series. "Burn Notice" kinda 'owns' the MacGyver moments," he wrote, referring to the 1980s show in which the hero improvised solutions with paper clips and the like. The email sparked a flurry of tongue-in-cheek responses from writers calling dibs on "gratuitous nudity" and "attractive people crying without smudging their makeup."

One way USA plans to go head-to-head with the broadcast networks is to debut more shows in the fall, as it did successfully with "White Collar." Cable channels typically have avoided autumn because of competition from the glut of new broadcast shows. Summer has become a crowded playing field, as cable networks make a bigger push into original shows. Turner's TNT will have eight of its original series airing this summer, including the start of the final season of "The Closer" and a new Steven Spielberg-produced series about the aftermath of an alien invasion.

Despite its size, USA has a start-up feel, with Mr. Wachtel and a seven-member team shepherding each new series. "Jeff doesn't get on the phone with me and say 'After consultation with our corporate parent and focus groups, we have the following priorities....' He says, 'I don't know, it just needs to be cooler, maybe dinosaurs, or helicopters,' " says Mr. Nix.

Dinosaurs and helicopters notwithstanding, Mr. Wachtel studied drama at Yale and before breaking into TV thought he'd be the artistic director of a regional theater. In the 1970s he produced David Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" in New York. He teaches a TV class at the American Film Institute and talks about storytelling with references to the classics. "Character and plot are Aristotle's two biggies. What do you know? Sounds like TV," he says.

In a senior strategy meeting earlier this month at USA's Universal City headquarters, Mr. Wachtel urged his team to start thinking about other genres. He floated the idea of an adaptation of Telemundo's popular telenovela "Queen of the South," about a female drug kingpin. "A billion people watch them, so there must be something to it," he said.

In addition to its original series, USA has spent big on reruns. Last fall it signed a deal to pay $2.3 million per episode for rights to air CBS's "NCIS: Los Angeles." It already airs "NCIS." Last summer it paid as much as $1.5 million per episode for 20th Century Fox's "Modern Family."

What is now called USA started in 1977—the Pleistocene era of cable—with sports, then in 1980 added a scrapple of talk shows and cartoons and the tagline "America's Favorite Cable Network." Later it ran action and cop shows like "Miami Vice" and "Murder, She Wrote" from the Universal television library. In 2004, General Electric Co., which owned NBC, took control of USA and the rest of Universal from Vivendi. Original series like "The Dead Zone" and "La Femme Nikita" drew big ratings by cable standards, but didn't give USA much buzz.

The success of "Monk," a critically acclaimed series with Tony Shalhoub as an obsessive-compulsive detective that ended in 2009, led to USA's current strategy to narrow in on sunny, comedic hour-long series driven by a single, heroic but eccentric lead character. In 2005, the network coined the slogan "Characters Welcome," and it has stuck.

As Mr. Wachtel searched for new shows, Co-President Chris McCumber, who heads marketing, tried to find a common thread that could make USA broad yet hipper and easily identifiable. For inspiration, he looked to the cheery red-bull's-eye marketing campaign of big-box retailer Target, which brightened a tired image.

"It was the channel that was always on in people's homes," says Ms. Hammer, "but it was like that old ratty slipper that dogs carry around in their mouths."

Over lunch on the 52nd floor of NBC Universal's Rockefeller Center offices, before the Comcast takeover closed, Mr. Burke met with eight senior executives at USA and another NBCU cable channel, Syfy. Everyone took turns explaining what they did and what their network had in the works. When Mr. Wachtel was up, he didn't tick off USA's pilots or tout ratings. He described the opening scene of "Common Law," when two cops are squabbling in couple's therapy. "At the end of the day, we're storytellers," he says.

The sentiment among USA brass is that Comcast understands them better than did GE, which still has a 49% stake. On a visit to Hollywood, a senior GE executive once listened to Mr. Wachtel and other executives explain what they did and then, perplexed, said, "Now I get it, you're like jet engineers," Mr. Wachtel says.

More

Comcast, on the other hand, although primarily a cable operator which strung wire and collected bills, already controlled cable networks like E! Entertainment Television, the Style Network, Golf Channel and others, now folded into NBC Universal's cable operation, which includes USA, Syfy, Bravo and news outlets CNBC and MSNBC. Combined, these cable networks make up 80% of NBC Universal's $2.3 billion in operating profit.

USA's asset value is estimated at $13.4 billion, according to Wunderlich Securities. That's nearly 10 times that of NBC. The peacock network had an estimated operating loss of as much as $600 million, including $193 million from the Vancouver Olympics and losses from expensive, low-rated 10 p.m. dramas, according to Matthew Harrigan, a media analyst at Wunderlich.

USA's ad rates still haven't caught up with its ratings. A 30-second ad during "Burn Notice" cost around $56,000, or $21.50 per 1,000 viewers aged 18 to 49. ABC's "Rookie Blue," which aired at the same time, averaged about $74,000 per 30-second ad or $42 per 1,000 viewers aged 18 to 49, according to SQAD Inc., a Tarrytown, N.Y., media-research firm.

Even with its original series, USA, like other cable networks owned by media giants, sometimes winds up carrying water for its corporate siblings, or legacy properties. The network still leans heavily on wrestling. "WWE Raw" brings 5.3 million viewers to USA on Monday nights and helps launch new shows like "WWE Tough Enough," a reality competition series about aspiring wrestlers. Daylight hours are still populated by "Walker, Texas Ranger," "Becker" and other low-cost reruns. This year USA will conclude "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" after 10 seasons. Reruns of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" and "House" will continue. They don't fit USA's smiley-face aesthetic, but they're made by Universal.

$13.4 Billion vs. $1.4 billion

Why Comcast likes its new cable network so much: USA's estimated asset value compared with that of NBC.

Source: Wunderlich Securities

On a recent day of shooting on location in New York, the crew of "White Collar" prepared for a brief scene in the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium. The location, swarming with schoolchildren on field trips, can cost as much as $50,000 a day to rent. So "White Collar" shot the main characters entering and exiting. They finished the scenes at an automotive-dealer training facility in Queens with a glassy façade that looks similar to the planetarium's.

USA was never a big part of the annual TV "upfront" festivities in New York. When the big broadcast networks rolled out new shows to advertisers with parties and star-studded presentations, USA held low-key dinners with a handful of marketers.

In two weeks, however, USA will host 750 guests in a giant tent at Lincoln Center, the same space top-ranked network CBS uses, complete with chaise longues, a performance by Janelle Monáe and 10-foot photographs of USA stars projected on the walls.

Aside from actors walking the red carpet at the upfront, the extra attention from USA's new corporate parent hasn't yet trickled down to individual shows. "On a day-to-day basis," says Mr. Nix, the creator of "Burn Notice" and its lead character Michael Westen, "whether Michael breaks through a wall or a ceiling is a much bigger part of our daily life than Comcast."

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